Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen
Palestinian cooking is bright, fragrant and deeply rooted in tradition, and this cookbook by food writer Yasmin Khan captures it with both honesty and appetite. It's a book that works on two levels at once, offering genuinely usable recipes alongside personal accounts from Khan's travels through the region. The two strands sit together naturally, each giving the other more weight. Yotam Ottolenghi called it 'a big bowl-full of delicious Palestinian recipes, plus lots of insightful and moving stories,' and Anthony Bourdain described it as 'moving, hugely knowledgeable and utterly delicious.' High praise, and largely deserved. The Observer Food Monthly went further still, suggesting that calling it a cookbook undersells it. Khan harvests black olives in the West Bank, hand-rolls maftool (the plump Palestinian couscous) in home kitchens in Jenin, and even stops for a pint at the Taybeh brewery, home to Palestine's first craft beer. These aren't tourist encounters. She eats and cooks with people of all ages and backgrounds, and their voices run through the book alongside the recipes. On the food side, you'll find herb-filled salads, quick pickles, fragrant soups, slow-cooked stews rich with aromatic spice, and a strong selection of vegetarian takes on Palestinian classics. Particular highlights include an olive, fig and honey tapenade, a roast chicken stuffed with pine nuts and raisins, and a pomegranate passion cake that earns its place on any table. Levantine cooking at its most colourful and considered.
- Author: Yasmin Khan
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
- Genre: Photography
- ISBN: 978-1408883846
- Pages: 256 pages